Fathers, Don’t Abort Your Daughters

You understood the hit you would be taking to your wallet and your social life, not to mention your sex life, but you balanced the ledger against baseball games and taking pictures of your little gangsta and busting out the old Transformers collection. Now, you’re supposed to stick around and help take care of a girl, a girl who will probably show an absolutely irrational preference for the color pink, a girl who will be fascinated with faerie princesses and Hello Kitty and (God forbid) Barbie, a girl who will probably prefer your wife and conspire with her against you.

So now you’re fantasizing about an abortion again, how one visit to a clinic could give you back the future you wanted, how you could escape from the whole situation and all the pressures it brought with it. You don’t feel ready for this. Your heart does not feel big enough. You’re still so selfish, so lazy, so irresponsible — and those are the things you like about yourself.

Don’t do it. Do not do it. Your daughter is waiting for you. She will expand and soften your heart. She will make you a better man. A daughter too is a blessing beyond measure. Give yourself to this, and she will make you into a protector and provider.

Comments

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9 comments

Daughters rock. When we were having our first, I was disappointed when I found out that the baby would be a girl. By the time we were having our second, I was disappointed when I found out it would be a boy.

He’s right. It fulfills that thing inside you that needs to be a protector.

Also .. this is going to sound weird. But there is something about having a child who is “sort of like you,” but, “not really like you,” and having them stand out in ways that you never could. It answers questions that you would never have dreampt of, let alone dream of asking. I like the answers and find it odd that I like them, but the answers don’t scare me.

Mootette is beautiful and she is sweet. People comment on those things all of the time. Personally, I don’t think of -myself- in those terms, but find satisfaction that she has those attributes.

This is odd. Are the presumably middle-class evangelical American male readers of StandFirm or the Patheos evangelical channel tempted by sex-selective abortion? I doubt it. For all its insanity concerning abortion do TEC members abort their girl babies? I doubt it. Do American husbands think, “yeah, I hate pink and I’m a bad dude. Time to make the Mrs. put that fetus down!”?

In fact, the basic fear of this entire article is easily disproven. Gender birth ratios in humans in nature are 105 boys to 100 girls, and in the United States last year according to the CIA World Fact Book there were… 105 boys for every 100 girls. (The Y chromosome is lighter, so male sperm are slightly faster and more likely to fertilize an egg).

So then the question is why is this article on StandFirm? Well, it’s clearly pro-life in pointing out an unfortunate and unforeseen consequence of liberal abortion policies leading to dysfunctional social engineering. That makes sense. I like that. But the whole female victim dynamic and male oppressor angle strikes me as belonging much more within the politically correct bounds of TEC hysteria.

Frankly, this article is sexist in implying that men are self-identified and self-satisfied in being “so selfish, so lazy, so irresponsible.” And what are we to make of this old madonna trope of women saving men? Typically, it’s the love of a good woman or mom that provides the salvation, but here that pressure is put on the small shoulders of baby girls who are viewed as uniquely saving compared to baby boys. I don’t have kids yet, but I’m pretty sure that baby boys require a good deal of selfless love too. So we’ve got the making of the classic Karpman Drama Triangle here in which the author presents himself as the savior of victim girls against persecuting men, and then there’s a switch to saving baby girls rescuing self-victimizing men. Hmmm…

The Karpman drama triangle typically begins in victimhood. And baby girls just aren’t victimized like this. What if this article speaks to some sense of male unease? What if that unease is displace onto women thus providing men with the fantasy of heroic rescue and the fantasy of real (dark) power. “Yeah, I could be a killer but instead I’m a hero,” seems to be part of the emotional logic. There’s also a lot of guilt. Guilt over sexism? Guilt at being male?

The problem with this fantasy and why I’m going to lengths to expose it is that it unconsciously mirrors the politically correct anti-male thinking of so much of society, the very same political correctness that’s killing the TEC and America. Because fantasies occlude reality they create problems and hide solutions. Where are adult women in this drama? Surely, American mothers have much say in sex selective abortion. One escape from p.c. thinking is holding women appropriately responsible and not swinging between all or nothing. And look how at the end of the article, the author praises his daughter in traditionally male terms. All of her accomplishments are in “tom-boy” activities like sports and farting. Again, that’s very odd. Is the author sexist against women or is he trying to assuage his own guilt at being a man by showing how he can raise women, women who are a lot like men?

Men, God made you male for a reason. Women, likewise. Embrace your own skin and then it’s easier to extend that comfort to the opposite gender.

Moot, yes that wouldn’t be the first time that someone wisely told me to lighten up. Point taken.

That said, male self-flagellation is a pet peeve. I knew a TEC priest who was a man of real courage, but every now and then he would slip into this whole p.c. false guilt thing and I’d have to hit the gym and catch a couple of hours of Band of Brother afterwards. Also, I have six younger sisters and female cousins, so this whole sex-selctive abortion thing is inconceivable to me, but I guess sadly that not everyone’s as lucky.

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